Behind The Scenes With The Team That Created Hanumankind's Iconic 'Big Dawgs' Music Video

I’ve been a culture writer at Homegrown for more than two years and I’ve seen numerous artists push the envelope of creative endeavour through talent, hard work and sheer force of will and tenacity. I’ve also seen more than my share of hyperbolic false dawns and self-proclaimed ‘watershed’ moments for homegrown artistry. 

Rapper Hanumankind’s latest music video for his high-octane, war cry of a single, ‘Big Dawgs’, doesn’t just push the envelope: it tears it to pieces and says, "Who the fuck even needs envelopes anymore?" The video, which transports Hanumankind and his audience into the chaotic frenzy of a Well Of Death, is a perfect storm of creative authenticity.

It takes the verbal prowess and unrepentant swagger of Hanumankind, the sonic alchemy of producer Kalmi, and the auteur-like visual and narrative precision of Bijoy Shetty and puts it into a powder keg filled with chaos, adrenaline, and an almost gladiatorial spectacle.

We’re flown directly into the action, where Hanumankind spits his flow as cars and bikes careen across verticle walls above his head; a raucous audience wrapped around his finger. The beat’s primary melodic motif seamlessly melds with the sound of roaring engines and the daredevils piloting their machines of chaos smile gleefully as they go round and round the velodrome. From the first shot to the last, you get the definitive sense that we’re witnessing a legacy unfold. 

In our struggle to get our due on a world stage that has largely relegated us to the periphery, we often jump onto trends; we follow convention and lose the authenticity that made us stand out in the first place. A machine of ‘industry experts’ who’ve never touched a mic, a DAW, a camera, or an instrument in their lives brainwash us into thinking what’s currently ‘popular’ is what’s going to last but that honestly couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Hanumankind aka Sooraj Cherukat, director Bijoy Shetty, DOP Abhinay Pandit and the entire team behind the music video understand the value of breaking away from convention and doing something that few creatives would have the audacity to replicate. It’s a statement of intent the likes of which we so rarely see from homegrown artists, one that forsakes the derivative ideas of bravado and self-indulgent excess that have been parroted a million times over across the Indian hip-hop landscape. 

Much like the stuntpeople in the video, Hanumankind and his collaborators are daredevils of their own making. They’ve rejected the safety and security of conformity and choose instead to put their creative hearts and souls on the line in pursuit of a distinct artistic authenticity that’s entirely emancipated from a formulaic monotony that’s become all too commonplace. 

We spoke to two of these collaborators: Bijoy and Abhinay, to find out more about how they created what’s going down as a pivotal moment for homegrown artistry across film, music, and performance art. 

Take us back to how the idea for the music video came to life. Did you first have the track in place or did you conceptualise the video before the track? We are curious to know some of the defining conversations that lead us to this powerful outcome. What do you think is allowing this video to connect to people the way it has? What’s allowing it to stand out not just across the country but globally? 

Bijoy Shetty: Sooraj wanted cars and he wanted bikes but I was very against it because it was like, “What's the point of doing something which will just dissolve into every other piece of content and not stand out at all?” It didn't have any life to it. Then eventually, through that process of denying that idea consistently, I had a moment of clarity. I was in a rickshaw and I heard a bike going by and then I heard the song after that. The bike’s engine sounded so much like the sample itself. Then I started doing research into exactly what I can do and that's when the idea came about.I feel like it's an idea that everybody had in their mind but never executed. It was an idea waiting to be done. 

I am as surprised as you are because when I made it, I didn't expect it to be like whatever is happening right now. I just felt like it had to be different; that was the only intention.

I didn’t want it to look or feel like anything else. That's why if you see he doesn't look at the camera that much. Like I tell him constantly, “Do not look at the camera because as soon as you look at it it feels like every other video.” But he was like, “But I do want to perform; I want to move my hands around; I want to do all those things.” I was completely against it initially but then I gave up on that I was like, “Okay fine, if that's what you want.”

I don't exactly know why it's connecting with people but I've always told Sooraj that he has the power of language and that he represents India. The language of English itself is such a culture-driving language. It sets culture and it defines culture to an extent. That language is one of the most powerful languages, that we as a species talk to each other in the most. And I realised as soon as I started working with him initially, that if he is able to post up out of India and be represented by India, then we’ll have achieved our goal.

I intentionally didn't give in to some of his asks. He was like, “I want to wear a jacket; I want to wear something flashy,” and I told him, “No money on - let's not try to idealize you. You are a part of the boys; you're a part of everybody over here. We don't want to sort of like make you into this guy. We want you to be the torchbearer of the homegrown scene.”

Abhinay Pandit: Bijoy and I have known each other for a while and we both follow each other. We’ve always wanted to collaborate but never really got the chance to up until now. When he reached out to me, he told me it was for a music video for Hanumankind and that got me really excited. I jumped at the chance and said, “Let’s do this!” 

I was a little shocked when I heard the initial idea because it sounded deadly, especially having Sooraj hanging out of a car rapping in a Well of Death. It sounded slightly risky but we were all into it. For me as a cinematographer, what I wanted to capture was the cultural aspect of the well. If you really look at the video it’s nothing too fancy: we’re literally just portraying the essence of the environment. It’s a bunch of talented daredevils doing their thing and going a little nuts on their home turf. I wanted to keep that aspect of things as real and as authentic as possible. 

I also wanted to put India on the map and make something that could last forever. I want to be able to look back at this project in a few years time, and feel like I did something that truly had an impact on the next generation of creatives.    

There was virtually no time to really prepare for the shoot and we only had about two days notice because of the schedule of the performers and the circus. The most challenging part for me was communicating with the people because we were shooting in Kerala. I come from Mumbai and the way we speak is very different and they have their own style. I had to learn how to break things down and that was a bit of a learning curve. Eventually, though we managed to communicate exactly what we wanted to do. 

We were all very emotionally invested in this whole production. We just wanted to create something. Personally, I wanted to take what I do worldwide so I think this project happened at the right time. It’s all about the culture and the community and how we express our creativity through that lens. 

What inspired you to pick the well of death as the backdrop of this video? There’s a homegrown community of stuntmen and daredevils that have persevered with their practice despite it slowly fading away as the years go by. Is this music video an ode to their unwavering and indomitable spirit of adventure? Could you talk a little about your experience working with these Indian daredevils? 

Bijoy Shetty: Yeah, so the thing was when I was researching this, there were such underwhelming videos of these guys actually doing their thing. It's just slow-motion shots of them riding around and them like, "I do this; I do that,” and they're fucking badasses. And nobody's shown them as badasses, they're shown as struggling guys. But they are not that; they’re true to who they are and they practice their craft every single day. They love to perform. They're Indians and they're entertainers. So the point was that if I want to show it, I don't want to show this like a documentary because there are a lot of documentaries on them already. It is definitely useful to tell those stories, but I wanted to show the world just how badass they really are. So because of all that I was just like, “These guys are perfect.”

It was literally the one day before the shoot that I locked that location and locked those guys. I said, "Sir, let's just sit and talk about how exactly we're going to do this and what exactly we're going to do." And they were all from Bombay - from Kalyan; all of them. They were just like, "Yeah, we'll do it, no problem; we'll do it." I think they were just happy to see a Bombay guy over there. 

Right before the shoot day, I had the entire place booked for practice with them and everybody had a route. They did it so many times and I don't think any other group could’ve pulled it off the way they did. In fact, if this video had more budget, it wouldn't exist. They perfectly understood what we were trying to do over there and kept going again and again and again and again. It was great. I was just constantly like, "Are you okay? Is everything fine? Do you want to do it again?" And they assured me, "No, no. We'll do it again. No problem. I'll do it every other day, I'll do it again. No problem." 

There is a conscious Indian cultural imprint of the music video from the backdrop of the deathwell to the community that practices the stunts to it being set in Kerala: it breaks away from the visual grammar we typically see across Indian hip-hop. It’s both rooted and authentic while still remaining high-octane and energetic. Could you speak to how you managed to strike that balance? 

Bijoy Shetty: 100% conscious. The thing about Indian hip-hop and Indian hip-hop videos in particular, is that they’re so saturated. They’re so influenced by the West. Everyone does the same shit. It’s the same car shit; it’s the same kind of shorts; it treats everything the same way.

And then I realized the West sees us as these exotic sapera people, right? So why not lean into that a little and show them that my artist will do that and also produce a very good song while at it?

It was an aggressive move because I was like, "Sooraj is putting out a song after a year. We need to lock in." For me, it's never about the video. It's about before and after the video. When I'm conceptualizing a video, I think about what I want people to feel, what I want Sooraj to feel right before he gets onto the shoot. Those two things are more crucial to me than the shoot itself. 

So, ultimately, it didn't come down to the fact that it's just supposed to be different; it's also supposed to be aggressive.  There were a lot of times initially when everything that Sooraj and I created eventually trickled down to everybody else's videos. I saw it happening. Where any concept that we created would reappear as a watered-down version eventually.

And we would get annoyed. For this one we were like, "What can we do that they can’t?" This is basically that: him in a car in a Well Of Death. Nobody's going to do that. Not many people have the guts to get into the car and be like, "Okay, let's get this going."

But yeah, it was just me and Sooraj just having fun. I wanted it to be something which could exist in people's minds for a while because content is so weird now and people forget about what they watch in an instant. It was like, “I have to make something and I need them to remember it for at least two to four years.” I don't need to put money into marketing because there are going to be people who are just like, "Bro, have you seen this?!" 

Abhinay Pandit: Each crew member involved in this production is truly a bonafide ‘big dawg’ in my view. This wasn’t in any way an easy production to pull off. There were times were it felt a bit like I was risking my life to get some of those shots but it was worth it to represent the culture authentically. 

It honestly all felt like a blur after the shoot. It was only when we saw the final cut that we felt, “Wow, we really made something.”  Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate the scale or impact of what you’re doing in the moment. It’s only when you zoom out and take some time away that you can truly appreciate it and see the bigger picture.

This video also resonated with me personally. My mom used to take me to see these circuses when I was young so I wanted to pay tribute to them with my creativity. I think I’m blessed to be a photographer because I can tell stories such as these. I plan to meet these stuntpeople again in the coming months so I can start putting together a photo project that talks about their journey and lives. I also want to capture their experience of working on a project like this one and working with us.  I see it as my way of showing respect and paying tribute to everything they do as performers. 

Could you break down how you plan out or blueprint a shoot as ambitious as this from a shot perspective? There’s an element of unpredictability in every single shot but in an environment like a ‘well of death’, there’s more than a handful of moving parts and elements that you have to keep track of and account for. Was everything we see in the video pre-planned or did you largely have to improvise and go with things as the shoot progressed?

Bijoy Shetty: A lot of it was improvisation. One of the main things that we did happened the day before the shoot. I always shoot all my videos on a phone camera so I get a basic understanding of what the flow is going to be. I keep some shots blank but what I do is basically is that I take out my camera and shoot the entire video as I want it. I'll have the intro shot ready and I'll tell Abhinav accordingly how to approach things.

Improvisation happens when we lose time. Those kinds of things have to happen, otherwise, I don't think there's any film. There might be some directors who never improvise but that’s not me. The main problem for us inside the well was communicating because it was just so indescribably loud. When you're in there, no matter what you do, hearing is going to be a problem. You keep the speaker inside: you can't hear it. You keep speaker on top: you can't hear it.

Then eventually I realized and asked Sooraj, “Where is your phone?” If you watch the video closely you’ll see he’s just wearing a random earpiece and he's listening to the song because there’s no other way he could hear anything.  The other thing I had to take care of was to make sure that my DOP or anybody who was in the well was taken care of, so we created a nonverbal language to help communicate. We had hand signs to signal things like “Okay, I'm fine”, “Feeling puke-ish”, and even something as simple as “Yeah”.

Abhinay Pandit: When working on music videos, what I pay attention to the most is the music behind the lyrics of a song. When you listen to ‘Big Dawgs’, gives you the impression that there’s a motorbike passing by. It also makes you feel like you’re in a room with an echo. We tried to match the music to the visuals we shot. Even the camera movements were synchronized with the underlying beat. To realize this Bijoy and I had lots of ideas to start with - which we storyboarded and sketched out. We didn’t over plan it but we had a good idea of exactly what we wanted to do. 

Some of it was improvised though, like the scene with the female stuntperson. That happened in the moment while Bijoy was explaining something to me and he was immediately like, “We have to get that!” We played a little fast and loose with those shots but other than that, a lot of it was planned out. 

Editing is often an unsung hero of the filmmaking process, particularly for shoots as ambitious as this. How challenging was it to mould the raw footage that you took during this shoot into the final cut we now see? Were all the visual effects in the video taken care of during post-production or were there any cinematographic experiments that you implemented during the shoot to get the shots you wanted? How much footage was left on the cutting room floor and is there any chance of the world getting a blooper video for this?   

Bijoy Shetty: There were three editors on this. Rishabh Shetty, who is my industry collaborator, who got on board and couldn't continue. So he left the project, but he helped me make the first cut and the first timeline of it. Then I had a shoot in Delhi. So I left and I gave it to a friend of mine called Rohan. I told him to just make it as crazy as you can: just make it it the most ‘cutty’ video possible. 

And then, I sat with my final main editor Mehran, who is the primary reason the video is so well cut. I think we sat for 60 hours. We would sit and work on this constantly because we knew if we didn't cut it well, it would be underwhelming and it would take away from the energy. A lot of things would have been like, “Okay, cool, nothing great about it.” 

It needed visual hooks in every section. Mehran really came through with that and made sure it flowed really well. I'm a very hands-on editor, I'm basically an editor who's a director. So I'm usually like, I know exactly what the cut is. So I'm sitting with all three of them and just being like, okay, this is what we got to do. It became four different people, including me, providing their creative input and that’s what made it even more interesting because we could see the good parts and the bad parts of each cut. 

The drone work across the video is nothing short of incredible and transports everyone watching right into the action. How challenging was it to manoeuvre a drone in an environment as chaotic as this? Were there any mishaps or logistical challenges that had to be dealt with over the course of filming? 

Abhinay Pandit: Nathan was our drone operator and he had prior experience shooting inside Wells Of Death, so he already had a good idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to approach things. That really helped me because there wasn’t a lot I had to explain to him. We kind of just let him do his thing and freestyle and that approach really worked out well. We let his creativity shine and allowed him to capture this world through his eyes and I think he really pulled it off.  

We did actually have an accident during the shooting. The lady stuntperson was hanging out of the car when the drone bumped into her. She was an absolute superstar though and didn’t even flinch. She was stuck in that car. These things can happen over the course of a production like this despite taking every precaution. Even though we made it look pretty big, it’s a very tight space.  We actually kept it in the initial cut but eventually decided against it. 

Could you speak a little about your partnership with Hanumankind and the kind of relationship the two of you have? You’re both creatives who are constantly striving to push the boundaries of your respective art forms. How do you two so consistently find those collaborative moments of inspiration that allow videos like ‘Big Dawgs’ to scale the heights that they have? What do you think is the most important thing you need for a creative partnership to thrive?

Bijoy Shetty: It's about survival. We’re both new to this industry and nobody's giving us anything. So it's just the fight to be like, “We are here; just notice it.” We don't want to be left out of this conversation. We don't want to be put in a position wherewe are capable of some things and we're not able to do it. 

It's just me and him and he's one of my best friends. My career started with him. I owe him a lot and so does he to me. The majority of it is just the pure need to create something for ourselves. We don’t want to underachieve and we want be perceived, in the the same way that every other creator wants to be perceived.

We have a lot of other things that are coming and we’re taking things it's step-by-step, but we also need to provide for our families doing all of these things. It's not easy to be a filmmaker or a musician in India. It's the most exhausting thing. It's honestly the most draining thing to be any kind of creative innovator. There are a lot of situations where you're constantly undermined or like underappreciated. 

So our work together is a platform for both of us to be like, “We got this. We can create something.” We have to create because there's no other way beyond this. We have to do it to survive and provide for the people we care about. 

The thing about this project was that it was personal for everybody. Nobody went, “Eh, it's just another video.”  That's the headspace that will fuck everything up. As soon as you go, “It's just another video,” then you have to make a different video. Abhinav knew right from the beginning that this was something special. Mehran also knew as he was cutting it, that this was not something that we or anybody else had seen ever. 

Even if it didn’t get the views, it had to be something that we would all look back on fondly. We used to stay up for 60 hours to edit because we were just like, “We have no other option; we have to.” There was just the need to do it. 

It’s all about survival. 

Is there anything you want to say or shout out to our readers who’ve watched the video and have helped it blow up the way it has? 

Abhinay Pandit: India has so much to explore creatively and I think each one of us should try to represent our own distinct culture through our creativity rather than faking it and adopting someone else's culture. I think that’s why the video has come out as well as it has: it was true to its essence; it was true to its culture.    

This video is a win; not just for me; not just for Bijoy; not just for Sooraj, but for everyone from this country. I think we should all be celebrating this.    

You can follow Bijoy here.

You can follow Abhinay here.

You can follow Hanumankind here.

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